


“Play With Me”

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: (though the backstory doesn't follow the song's plot), Bittersweet, Demon Deals, Ghosts, Humanstuck, Insane Clown Posse References, M/M, Possible Romance with a Ghost, Swearing, antique shop, haunted doll - Freeform, inspired by a song, lots of swearing, visions of the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23970370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: “Why don’t you come play with me and take me to the other side?  Lost under Ann Raggedy, it’s lonely when you’re locked inside...” — Insane Clown Posse, “Play With Me”Karkat Vantas accidentally meets a dead man, attempting to repair a ruined clown puppet to sell at the antique store where he works.
Relationships: (not until the second part though), (who may or may not just be another version of Karkat? Ambiguity~), Amisia Erdehn & Chahut Maenad, Chahut Maenad & Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara & Lord English, Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara/Original Character(s), Sollux Captor & Karkat Vantas, Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido, mentioned
Comments: 18
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! I... have no real excuses for this, except that I've wanted to write something with Gamzee based around the song "Play With Me" for a long time. (Possibly fun fact: it's my favorite ICP song.) 
> 
> Thank you very much, and I'm so sorry for anything and everything I might've gotten wrong!!! I hope you've been staying safe and having a great day.
> 
> PS -- The absolutely AMAZING artist Ceabu drew a picture for this story, along with some of my other fics!!! <3 <3 <3 I'm wondering if I shoulda linked it right away (what's the protocol, here, anyway???) but https://ceabu.tumblr.com/post/622664873516711936/u-ever-love-a-fic-writers-thatsrightdollface <\-- Her art = fantastic...... :')

I. Scrapbooks

When Karkat Vantas first started working for the antique shop, he thought he’d never get used to the smell of the place. It wasn’t a bad smell, honestly — it was sugary and sharp, like spilled soda on the counters. It was glue and mothballs, old books and the kind of lamps people carried around in gothic horror novels. It was just kind of a lot. It was distracting, and made Karkat feel like he was the one piece in the store’s collection that probably wouldn’t work as a haunted house prop. Yet. 

The whole store was “kind of a lot,” but Karkat needed the job, and he _had_ gotten used to the smell by now. He suspected it clung to his clothes, too, and followed him faintly when he slumped back to his apartment after closing up. Chahut Maenad, the shop’s owner, was a decent enough boss, though. She was laid-back and forgiving; she didn’t seem to mind that Karkat wrote stories on crumpled paper behind the register when it got quiet, and she always made sure there was coffee in the back of the store. Coffee and sticky artificial sweeteners, paid vacation time and concerned texts instead of guilt trips when Karkat called in sick... things could’ve been worse. Things _had_ been worse, at Karkat’s old job. You know the worst casual dining restaurant in town, across the street from the plastic-y Peixes Jazzercise place with all those huge, improbable fish tanks in the windows? Yeah. He used to work there. 

Chahut was protective of her employees when weird things happened around the store, too, like when customers stormed in to try and smash one of their porcelain music boxes, feverish and shaking and muttering about ghosts, or when the rickety old bathroom flooded. She had a slow, chuckling voice, and stood so tall above Karkat his neck started to ache if she forgot to sit down during a longer conversation with him. Chahut usually remembered to grab a chair. She wore polka-dot rompers and listened to Insane Clown Posse; her hair reached down past the small of her back, and she’d named her shop “Scrapbooks” because it was like a tangible record of a lot of faded lives. (And also, uh, because she liked scrapbooking.) The shop was like a celebration of the stuff that hung on after people left, and... more often than Karkat would’ve wanted to admit to his roommate Sollux... the stuff almost anyone else would’ve thrown away. But Chahut could scrub it carefully until it was pretty again. Chahut patched up abandoned stuffed animals, and fixed delicate old jewelry with thick, surprisingly-nimble fingers.

She was teaching Karkat how to do that sort of thing, too, since he’d been working for Scrapbooks a few years, now: how to take mercy on the broken, abandoned things that turned up at their door. At first he’d just been humoring her, because she was his boss and he could rant about her as soon as he got home. But now, just like he’d gotten used to the smell of the shop — used to the cackling clown masks on the walls and vials of novelty fake blood for sale next to strips of gum at the register, all that — Karkat could sort of see why Chahut wanted to run a place like Scrapbooks. Her faith was about taking in the abandoned; Juggalos were apparently supposed to be accepting and surprisingly considerate. Chahut had been trying to preach her role since she was young. She said maybe there _were_ ghosts in her shop, but that was just all the more reason to treat the items that passed through well. They would all be judged for their cruelties, in time. They would all have to open the riddle box of their souls and see what sort of mysteries were waiting. 

Karkat didn’t believe in any of that, of course — and he’d told Chahut as much, in what she rumbled was a ruder way than maybe she oughta take — but it made sense, for her. Karkat would never admit it out loud, but it wasn’t as if he’d never felt like a dirty teddy bear nobody wanted to hold, or a broken necklace, or a ring somehow missing the gemstone that should’ve been right in the middle of the band. Maybe that was part of why Chahut hired him. Part of why she taught him her trade, and tried to give him a place where he felt safe enough to know she wasn’t gonna kick him out on his ass for saying something stupid. 

Earlier that day — the day Karkat ended up with a ghost in his apartment — Chahut brought him a toybox full of stuff she’d picked up at a yard sale. “Some of these lil guys are pretty cute,” she’d said. “Fucking dirty and probably broken, but cute. Wonder if you can bring any of ‘em back to life for me? I’m going out of town for Amisia’s art show this weekend.”

“Sure,” Karkat said. “Hi to Amisia.” Amisia was Chahut’s best friend, and Karkat honestly didn’t understand her paintings. It was possible Chahut didn’t either, but she’d pour emotion and poetry into analyzing every one of them until they meant something real to her. Until she could look at a painting and cry.

Karkat peeked into the toybox and winced. Fuck. This was a tomb for rotting things, with a warped wooden train and mildewed picture books. It made sense _Chahut_ would give a shit about it — that was in her doctrine, in the poetry she’d made of ICP lyrics and community and a lot of stuff Karkat didn’t get. But also: ew.

“Ew, Chahut,” Karkat said. He couldn’t resist. 

“I know,” Chahut laughed. “If it’s too much for you, I’ll get on it when I’m back.”

But Karkat promised he would give cleaning these toys a fighting shot. He’d seal the whole box in a giant plastic bag and carry it home with him, even, so he could spread each battered toy out on a tarp on the floor and try — ugh. And try to be kind, the way he’d seen Chahut be kind. Was he jealous of the serenity that washed over her face, fixing up broken things? Did he wonder what peace like that could taste like? 

Karkat would complain, of course, and try not to breathe in anything rotten... but he’d do it. Chahut had to expect complaining like that from him by now, right? She got worried about Karkat when he was too quiet and agreeable. It was like the tap running soda instead of water, she said: it’s nice, but a person had to wonder why. 

Karkat didn’t see the clown puppet down at the bottom of the box, but if he had he would’ve noticed dizzy purple-marble eyes creaking painfully alive. One of them was cracked, and they both had dirt crusted around the edges. Old hurt, old longing, old loss. The puppet’s strings were tangled, and his smile was smudgey. He had been waiting at the bottom of the box for a long, long time, and before that he’d been –

Well. 

He was just dying all over again to show someone what the fuck he had been. 

But Karkat didn’t notice, not yet. 

II. Puppetry

Here’s a funny thing about Karkat’s apartment building: there were always pigeons hanging around, hopping along windowsills and crowding the path up to the door, pecking at a person’s shoes. People said a kid who lived on the top floor — the Harley residence, and the nicest place in the tower given that Mr. Harley owned the complex — trained some of those pigeons and left food for the rest. People said that when mean kids stole his sister’s homework, Jude Harley could send those pigeons to swipe it right out of their hands. Karkat didn’t believe it, but when he told Chahut the story she nodded approvingly. “Good brother,” she said. 

Usually, when Karkat made his way home, the pigeons rustled around him curiously. Maybe they skittered along a couple steps behind him, hoping he’d toss them a fry from the fast food bags he’d picked up for himself and Sollux. Maybe they crooned accusingly at him, ‘cause he was home late after running away from a date gone wrong. But they were a constant presence, same as the rattly pipes in the walls and Mr. Harley’s weird paintings of flexible blue women in the lobby. Same as Sollux’s elaborate computer setups and coding jargon monologues when Karkat asked him what the fuck he was doing at four in the morning. Same as Chahut’s deep giantess laugh, on the phone with Amisia, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. 

When Karkat came home with that box of antique toys Chahut had asked him to clean, though — with the clown puppet crumpled inside, limbs bent wrong, waiting in the dark for years and years and years — all the pigeons shuddered. All the pigeons — huddled around that statue of Mr. Harley on a hunting trip that guarded the door, or hanging out on trees and windowsills, or creeping at Karkat like the tiny fast food-hungry dinosaurs they were — took flight and were gone. It was a flurry of dirty feathers, a blur of frenzied cooing and then... for the first time Karkat could remember... almost silence on the path leading up to that apartment building. He could hear somebody’s music playing through the walls, and a siren off in the distance but, yeah, otherwise: silence. 

Huh. 

Karkat shifted the water-stained, stinking-through-its-plastic-bag toybox in his arms and shuffled up to the door. He could’ve put in his access code, if he’d been willing to set the box down and heave it back up again, but instead he pressed the call button with his elbow and got Sollux to buzz him up. 

“What the hell was that?” Sollux asked. He’d had both a heavy lisp and a playful sarcasm to his voice since they were kids. “All the birds just decided they hate us. I can actually hear myself think.” 

“No idea,” Karkat said, and he meant it. Any wriggling doubt in the back of his mind — any questions he had about why the box in his hands never felt any warmer, no matter how long he carried it — never formed themselves into cohesive thoughts. It often goes that way, in stories like this one. Sollux said his girlfriend Aradia had stopped by earlier and they’d made a lasagna together. Karkat was welcome to have some.

Sollux and Aradia had been dating for ages now. It was only a matter of time before she either moved in with them here or Sollux packed up all his tangled wires and flickering blue-to-red computer lights and fucked off across town to stay with her. Karkat felt the future barreling towards them like a car skidding on the ice, or like a pigeon zooming towards a bully to grab some poor girl’s stolen homework away. Whatever happened, they were standing on the edge of change all the time, and some things were always gonna be left behind. Working at Scrapbooks had really driven that thought home. Picking up the pieces; remembering the lost. Karkat said thanks, and that he knew Aradia had better taste in lasagna than boyfriends, and headed inside. 

Eventually... barring any kind of horrible accident... Jude Harley would grow up — and then what would happen to the pigeons around here? Who would feed them? 

Karkat ate cold lasagna and watched Sollux play a video game for a while, next — he was an obnoxious backseat-driver about it all, and eventually Sollux dared him to try and do better. Karkat could _definitely not_ do better. Sollux was taunting him about it, tsk-ing at him and snickering through his crooked teeth, when Karkat decided to get started on that box of toys. He had actual work to do, Sollux. No time for fucking games! 

Better to throw away what couldn’t be saved, right? Better to get any gross spores away from them as soon as possible. Karkat spread out a tarp, and tied a mask over his nose and mouth. He wore silly rubber gloves with crabs all over them that Aradia had gotten him for his birthday, too. It was almost like, you guessed it, he’d done this before. His zodiac sign was Cancer, see. Aradia had taken one look at the grumpy little faces on those cartoon crabs and thought, “Look. It’s a bunch of cutesy rubber glove Karkats!” 

Whose toys had these been, before they were ruined and sticky and lonely, here in this horrible old box?

Who was gonna feed the pigeons, if Jude Harley left?

Karkat got to work. He decided to toss the picture books — a shitty thing to do as an amateur writer, but it wasn’t like they could ever be read again. He soaked old grime off some seashells, and he was sanitizing a handful of probably-costume jewelry in a big tub when he saw the toybox move. Or. He didn’t actually, properly see it move. He knew he’d put it on his right side because he was right-handed, and the next time he reached over to fish around for more costume rings in need of a good clean he found it was gone. 

_Behind him._ The toybox had been dragged on invisible puppet strings, around Karkat’s back and pressed up too close behind him. He jumped, and yelped, and splashed some soapy water on the floor. He called, “Not funny, Sollux! Asshole,” but the shooting game noises back in the apartment’s living room didn’t stop. They hadn’t slowed down this whole time, actually. So then how did Sollux...? 

Karkat blinked at the toybox, and decided maybe something in the cleaning fumes was getting to him. Maybe some kind of mold; maybe dehydration; maybe sleeplessness. He dragged the toybox back over to his right side, and it made a heavy squelching sound over the tarp. That was when he saw the clown puppet. The puppet had dragged its way to the surface of things, painfully, achingly. The puppet had floppy ragdoll arms and curly yarn Raggedy Ann hair. The moldy plush bits didn’t seem to match the porcelain painted clown-face. Like he’d been put together from a lot of parts that didn’t match right. 

Somehow, even just looking at the clown, Karkat thought he must have been loved, once. Long ago. Loved, and then thrown away. Karkat frowned, and said, “Oh, God. I’ll — I’ll get to you in a minute. Shit. New cloth, I think. New stuffing. New strings. But I should be able to save your face...?” His voice sounded far like it belonged to someone else. Why was he talking to a fucking clown doll?

Alright. 

Alright, motherfucker. Let’s just get our wait on again, wait until the ocean dries up, wait until your heart turns to a sour mush inside your goddamn motherfucking chest. _Wait_. If Karkat could taste a simmering anger in the air like a sickness — if Karkat felt the hair rising on the back of his neck, and heard Sollux’s video game noises sounding farther and farther away — he didn’t let himself believe what it meant. Chahut had told him there might be ghosts in the antique store, and she had said it was their devotion to be kind. She said the Dark Carnival was a place of judgement, and all souls had to pass on and open their riddle box in time. All souls. Some made deals out of rage, out of hurt and love and hunger. But in the end, they were only souls. 

Karkat wanted to run, but he barely breathed. Barely moved. Maybe he knew, deep inside, that whatever happened next would play out suddenly if he ran. 

Karkat finished cleaning off the costume jewelry, hands shaking, and the next time he dragged his eyes over to the clown puppet he saw he was waiting patiently, exactly like they’d agreed. Once upon a time, that smile must have been silly and sweet. Trusting. Once upon a time, this puppet must have danced and danced and danced to entertain just anybody who could pull the strings. 

Karkat took the clown doll in his hands, limp and lifeless. He laid it down on the tarp in front of him, and said “I’m going to get started, now. I’m —”

But that was all he could say. 

The clown puppet had been waiting to play for a long time. He hadn’t wanted to play with Karkat, not originally, not specifically, _not only_ , but it had been so long. All human faces blended together in time. All clumsy pumping human blood. The clown puppet had been waiting and waiting to be seen, to be lifted out of that box. And now he lifted Karkat’s mind away on slithering puppet strings, just in turn.

Karkat smelled the sea, first off. He smelled the sea — a hundred miles and more away from his apartment, wasn’t it? — and when he looked down his hands weren’t his own. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!!! :D I hope you enjoy the second part of this story, and that you've been having a wonderful day. Thank you~

III. Make Believe

Karkat Vantas knew he had a different name, here, now, in this grey crumbly town by the ocean, but for the life of him he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was. The borrowed name slid past him whenever people spoke. He knew he didn’t belong here, really — he knew he was supposed to be fixing up a toybox full of abandoned most-definitely-haunted treasures back in his apartment... he knew he was supposed to scream for his friend Sollux, and maybe pray to something, someone, now. Maybe try to wrench his mind free. But more than that, he knew what it felt like to buckle these old-timey shoes in the morning, and what sort of fish to buy at the market, and that he’d grown up here in this very town. He knew this new self — this new place — and it drowned out all his other thoughts like a rancid humming. Like a hundred thousand flies swarming over his skin. 

Karkat knew who he was, here, even if he never properly heard his own name: he knew he taught children to read and wrote articles for the local paper. Stories, too. He knew he wrote stories under a daring pseudonym, and his suitor was so proud of him. His suitor used some of his family’s money to bring Karkat into big cities to look for publishers for his stories, and Karkat had been embarrassed of him in polite society. (Even though Karkat had been born to a family of fishermen and his suitor was a noble, only _one_ of them tried to make that damn clown puppet dance for people at fancy parties.) Karkat’s suitor was an eccentric; they’d known each other since they were young, and as long as Karkat had hung around him he’d been hearing “I Love You”-s. He offered love back, but maybe not with as much of his heart as he could’ve given. Maybe not, though Karkat _had_ written him jokey picture books when they were younger, and collected seashells with him, talking about everything. Trusting him to understand.

Gamzee Makara. Karkat’s suitor was named Gamzee Makara, and he had held on to a box of toys from his childhood just like he’d held on to the idea that Karkat had gentle hidden depths, and his aristocratic old goat of a father would come back from galivanting abroad someday, and there were angels everywhere. Karkat knew Gamzee’s wild, tangly hair without ever seeing it before — he had so many memories of trying to tame that hair, brushing sand out of it and tying it back with a stupidly expensive inherited purple ribbon. Karkat knew Gamzee’s slow, creaking voice, and his drinking habit, and that he would’ve felt awful throwing away any “old friends.” Not toys, no — “old friends,” and Gamzee was a grown man, now. Karkat told him he should be beyond waiting on the beach for a father who always promised to come home on the next ship but had given up on him long ago... and do you think Gamzee listened? Well, yeah. He listened and nodded and gave Karkat these dizzy, half-drunk eyes.

“I gotta go meet him just in case, you know?” Gamzee said. “If he shows up and I just motherfucking _don’t_ , I won’t be... I couldn’t all think on forgiving myself, then. Maybe he really bought a ticket this time. There’s greater miracles than that every day, all the fuck around me.” Gamzee kissed Karkat’s forehead — he swore worse than a sailor, despite his high-born blood. “There’s you, for example. Haha, get it?”

 _There’s you_ — there was Karkat, or whatever his actual name was, here. Gamzee’s miracle. Karkat had known he was Gamzee’s miracle, and looking back on it... feeling it for the first time, or all over again, whatever this was... he was glad. Back in his apartment — back working at Scrapbooks — Karkat knew he’d never had love like this. He’d never felt like anyone’s miracle. He leaned into Gamzee’s chest, arms around his middle. He chose to stay, and they lived out lives together for what could have been a long time. 

But also, lives that barely took any time at all, of course; but also lives that had already happened. The flies droned on, taking flight off the edge of Karkat’s lip and crawling between his fingers. This life was a rotten thing. 

They got married. Karkat had his books published, and never told Gamzee he was worried about his health, for some reason — even though the real Karkat, the one on the sticky tarp-floor back in an apartment impossibly far away, honestly _was_ worried. Gamzee drank too much, and he barely slept or he slept too much, and one day after crashing his carriage over the boardwalk and into a dark midnight ocean he broke his arm and it never healed right. So why was Karkat both so worried and doing nothing at all? How could he be anxious about his husband and also sort of _not_? Maybe he was kind of embarrassed, instead, and flustered, and furious with himself for being embarrassed and flustered. You know. 

Two lives, tangled together. Two selves across time, but when everything fell apart — truly, utterly fell apart — Karkat followed in this other self’s footsteps. He couldn’t help it, right? This had to happen. The clown had to end up at the bottom of the toybox, sold at a yard sale across the country. The ghost had to end up restless and angry, again and again. 

The flies crowded around, buzzing on. 

When Lord English came for Gamzee, Karkat was there to see it. Of course he didn’t believe in angels; of course he didn’t believe in devilish crossroads deals, or any of the spiritual crap Gamzee poured himself out for. (Like Chahut Maenad’s spiritual crap, back in the world he knew? He shouldn’t call it that, though: one version of Karkat was trying to learn better, by now.) 

Either way... either way, when Lord English came into their swaying decadent house by the sea, Karkat could feel there was a smothering _wrongness_ about him. He didn’t say a word about it, though. He’d had other things on his mind. He’d glanced at Gamzee entertaining Lord English in the parlor, and then stormed upstairs and away. He didn’t have time for this.

Lord English had shiny ceramic eyes painted like billiard balls, but he could still see everything around him just fine; Lord English didn’t cast a shadow in the tumbling firelight. When Gamzee called over his shoulder that this man could teach him what had happened to his father — this man spoke to the angels, and knew the darkest truths about God — Karkat heard that he was drunk again more than he took in any of the words. He called some frustrated nothings downstairs, just to shut Gamzee up... even as his insides were burning, his heart gone raw and horrified in his chest so many decades away. Karkat was dealing with some problems with his publishers, see. He was composing a nasty letter, and running his hands through his hair until he got ink smeared across his forehead, and when Gamzee asked if he should listen to what Lord English had to say Karkat shot back, “How much money does it cost, I guess? This venture?”

“No money at all,” Gamzee said, unsteady on his feet in the doorway. This was the same room where he’d fallen asleep with his head in Karkat’s lap so many times, reading together. This was the same room where he’d called Karkat his miracle. “He says he’s got to needing me for something else.”

 _Lord English needed Gamzee for something else._ And in that moment, Karkat found himself thinking, “Yeah, and what could _you_ be good for?” It was a thought just oozing with flies; the buzzing consumption of it swallowed up everything else. It wasn’t _his_ thought, exactly. Not this time around. It was the beginning of the end. 

“You should do it,” Karkat told Gamzee. “Absolutely.” He didn’t take the words seriously, of course. He didn’t think through what they meant, but still he said them. 

And then Gamzee gave Lord English what he needed — everything he needed, including his will, including his skin — and he signed his name in fire on the contract. When hordes of policemen questioned Karkat about the blood on Gamzee’s hands... about the deaths that came next... he said he had no idea what had happened. Gamzee must have always been dangerous, somehow. A monster under a lopsided, silly smile. It was like when he drove his carriage off the pier, wasn’t it? Couldn’t be trusted to look after his own self, nevermind a husband, could he?

Could he?

Karkat _could_ have found the contract written with fire easily enough, if he’d bothered to look for it; Karkat could have gone hunting for a creature called “Lord English,” or promised Gamzee he knew what he was talking about, at least. He could have tried to bring his husband home — to get him back — to understand what had happened. But with everyone in that seaside town’s eyes on him... with gossip the way it was, and his literary reputation to think about, and Gamzee changed in front of his eyes, a raging, blasphemous creature, hair falling into his face and crusted with blood and salt water... Karkat turned away. It was easier to leave Gamzee behind, whatever he might have known. 

Karkat _knew_ this wasn’t his husband testifying in court, not completely; Karkat knew deep in the core of himself that there had been a demon in their home, or something like one. A demon hunched and smiling at their fireplace. But it was better to throw away what couldn’t be saved, right?

Karkat knew without knowing how the rest of the story would go. He — Gamzee’s husband — would hide everything that belonged to him away in the attic of that fancy ancestral house Gamzee had inherited from his missing father. His cookbooks, his clothes, his box of “old friends” from childhood. Gone. Karkat would remake the house into something that suited him... something that never embarrassed him in polite society... and he’d let them take Gamzee away. For all he knew, Gamzee would wait for him to visit just the same way he’d waited for his father on the beach, staring out into the ocean until his eyes got fuzzy. Studying every face as passengers bundled themselves off arriving ships. For all Karkat knew, Gamzee would wait until the day he died alone in a box, hidden away, just somebody’s forgotten toy. His father’s, or Karkat’s, or Lord English’s. They were finished with him, and when Karkat passed on the house would go to his next partner. And so on, and on, and on. 

The clown puppet had to make its way to that yard sale Chahut visited, after all. It was useless to fight it: it had already happened. Karkat was screaming inside his head, but he knew how it had to go. 

He knew —

And then he didn’t listen. 

Here at the end of the game — with the flies buzzing so loudly in his soul he could barely breathe, could barely _be_ — Karkat went to him. To Gamzee. Not as his other self, but as the man sitting in his apartment, hoping all Jude Harley’s pigeons would be brave enough to come back. As the man who had never been anyone’s miracle before, and knew what this other self had taken for granted. It took all of Karkat’s strength to fight against the pull of time... against the game, and everything that had to be true... but he found Gamzee’s contract hidden away in that house they’d shared together and tore it to pieces in twitching, sweat-soaked hands. 

They looked like _his_ hands, now, didn’t they? Not the ones he’d been borrowing, the ones that came along with a name he didn’t know. Karkat ripped Gamzee’s contract apart with his own hands, and they burned as he did it. The contract belonged to fire, and that fire worked its way up Karkat’s palms. He smothered it out on the posh carpet, but of course it would leave a scar. A scar on his hands and on Gamzee’s soul, but still: the deed was fucking done.

When Karkat found Gamzee himself, it was in a cell under the earth — a cell like a rotten toybox. When Karkat found Gamzee, his husband-that-was-not-his-husband had screamed until his voice was new and ragged. Whispery sometimes, and howling sometimes, but never the self he used to be. He was a murderer and a villain; he was abandoned and raging, sick beyond sick. He told Karkat he might as well just strangle him through the motherfucking bars, you know motherfucker? The contract was gone, but the angel was still in him. 

Karkat held Gamzee through the bars, whoever stared at him, whoever muttered about it. Dumb gossip. It didn’t matter. Karkat held Gamzee as he shook, as he screamed, and the ravenous buzzing of all those too many flies grew and grew all around them until Karkat could feel it rumbling in his bones. And then... all of a sudden... it quieted. Gamzee grew still and soft in Karkat’s arms. 

Gamzee was all bones, now. He threaded his arms through the bars and held Karkat back, going limp against him. Like a ragdoll; like the clown puppet that would carry his soul when he died. He took a deep, shuddery breath, and murmured, “What happened?” down into Karkat’s hair. “Do you know where the fuck we are?”

“We’re going home,” Karkat said, and no, he wasn’t sure how he was planning to swing anything like that. But he knew Gamzee’s voice sounded more like himself, now; he knew he couldn’t hear the flies anymore; he knew the game was almost over. He pulled back and brushed some of Gamzee’s ruined hair out of his face, surprised by his own tenderness. 

If Gamzee were alive, Karkat could take him to holiday parties at Sollux’s work, and watch bad movies with him on the couch. If Gamzee were alive, Karkat could bring him by Scrapbooks, and he was absolutely certain Chahut wouldn’t have to work too hard to get him into Insane Clown Posse’s music. Karkat would teach him what it was like to have someone actively working to love him... Karkat would take him to AA meetings or something if he needed them... Karkat would fix up his damn clown puppet so it looked like new again, and keep that box of Gamzee’s “old friends” in a corner of the living room with only a little complaining. Gamzee knew he’d complain, by now, like Chahut knew, and Sollux, and Aradia. Gamzee would laugh slow and drawling again, and it would all be okay. 

Gamzee wasn’t alive, of course... but he _was_ kissing Karkat’s forehead, again, like he had so long ago. This wasn’t supposed to happen — it was happening anyway. And then Karkat was gone. 

He woke up on that mucky tarp, spread out across the floor of his apartment and wearing his rubber gloves with the cartoon crabs on them. Sollux had called 911, and an ambulance was on its way. 

IV. The Other Side

The burns on Karkat’s hands looked like words in some script no human could read. They had lingered on, after he and Sollux got back from the hospital. Karkat had been completely unresponsive for a while there; Sollux hadn’t even been able to find a heartbeat. He’d tried CPR, crouched on the floor by the soggy, rotting clown puppet. He’d gripped Karkat’s arm so tightly, telling him why he should hold on, reminding him that he was his best friend in the world. Even if he _was_ a douchebag sometimes – even if he’d brought something weird and dangerous into their home and Sollux was gonna pass out in a second, too – Karkat was still and always Sollux’s best friend. That could’ve been pretty close to being Sollux’s miracle, even if time would come for both of them, like it always did, and things couldn’t stay exactly the same forever.

That sounded sappy as hell, didn’t it? Embarrassing, even. Maybe. Didn’t stop it from being true.

When they got back from the hospital, Karkat’s hands were in bandages. There hadn’t been anything around that could burn him, of course, but he’d gotten swabbed with medicines all the same. They’d scanned his brain; they’d checked his heart. Sollux called Chahut to ask about the weird toybox, and she and Amisia had both come to check in on Karkat at the hospital. Chahut said she was _so fucking sorry_ she’d left Karkat with a box of toys that could actually hurt him. She rumbled about chemicals – about spores – about raw guilt and apology, but Karkat told her it was fine. Her part in this mess, at any rate, was fine. She’d taught him things that had helped him through it, though obviously she couldn’t realize it, yet. 

Karkat was exhausted – like he’d just, oh I don’t know, _lived and then been dropped out of a whole long borrowed lifetime_. If he let himself be overwhelmed… if he let himself confront what had just happened… he’d scream to wake the dead. Things were never going to be the same again. Karkat was a different man than he’d been even just a handful of hours before.

He’d been married. His husband was ridiculous, and affectionate, and dead.

He’d defied the will of a demon. That demon’s mark was branded on his hands, like some new contract he couldn’t hope to understand.

He’d seen stuff that made him think, well, maybe some of those music boxes customers tried to smash around the antique store could’ve actually been haunted. Who knows?

Karkat’s brain was fine, though. He told Chahut he’d explain exactly what had happened later, but not to let anybody throw away that clown puppet back at his apartment, in the meantime. He still had to fix it up. That was a weird fucking thing to say, given the circumstances: Chahut squinted at Karkat, then, chewing a little on the inside of her lip. She said sure, yeah, you got it. As long as Karkat lived to rant on another day, and to write more stories behind the register if he wanted to. That’s what mattered. Scrapbooks was gonna take care of Karkat’s medical bills after insurance, at least, so don’t even worry about any of that shit. Thank God he was okay.

Jude Harley’s pigeons were creeping back around the apartment complex by the time Karkat got home, rustling their wings and cooing in exasperated relief. Everything looked faded and strange in the watered-down light of a new morning. Those pigeons flapped over to the statue of Mr. Harley in his hunting gear, just like usual, though; they perched on his head and pecked at his dramatically carved stone mustache. 

Sollux went easy on Karkat, the next time they played video games together, but the minute Karkat started grating on his nerves he went back to kicking his ass, again. Karkat fixed up Gamzee Makara’s clown puppet, working slowly, carefully – repainting the smile just like he remembered it in that other life... or as close as he could get it, anyway... and cleaning dirt out of the edges of those marble eyes with a Q-tip. Almost everything except the clown puppet’s face was replaced, by the end, and Sollux took one look at it and said, “It’s still so creepy, KK.” It sort of was, but _Gamzee_ hadn’t thought so, for whatever reason. The clown puppet would stay living on Karkat’s bookshelf. It was fine. Sollux said he could just turn the head away from himself, sometimes, if it seemed to be following him spookily throughout the day. 

Over the summer, when the coast was warmer and slightly less grey, Karkat and his friends were going to find Gamzee’s grave. Chahut and Aradia both believed his story, however stupid and impossible it was, and maybe Sollux would’ve booked them a couple motel rooms even if he didn’t believe it. They were gonna clean that grave up some, and drive by the sea salt-crusty old manorhouse if it was still standing. Karkat would leave dark purple flowers on Gamzee’s patch of unconsecrated prison dirt, like the ribbon he’d tied in his hair. You know. The ribbon he’d tied – or Gamzee’s actual husband had tied? 

It didn’t matter. 

Karkat kept working at Scrapbooks: that shop meant to celebrate things anyone with common sense would throw away, as he’d called it, though obviously he didn’t mean that, now. He’d gotten used to the smell around the store a long time ago, and some of the tarnished mirrors and janky clocks were only there because _he_ had chosen to believe in them. Karkat hadn’t come across anything else genuinely haunted yet, he didn’t think. Good riddance, really. But he could do some good here. Not in a flashy way – not as a famous novelist, yet, or the sort of person whose name would end up in even one history book. But it meant something that Karkat had been someone’s miracle. It meant something that he’d seen a hopeless man through to the other side.

Here on the other side of a haunting, Karkat still found himself waking up and expecting Gamzee to be there next to him, sometimes, mouth hanging open sloppily in his sleep, dark curls spilled out on the pillows between them. Here on the other side of a haunting, Karkat thought he knew that when he left his own stuff behind in this world… his own legacy, to end up in somebody else’s antique store, maybe, or to rot in an oozey garbage dump until it was barely his anymore… Gamzee would be waiting for him. Like he’d waited for his father, and his angels, and his first husband. Don’t ask Karkat how he knew that. It felt as clear as the burn scars on his hands. Inscrutable, impossible, but undeniably _there_. 

Gamzee had kissed his forehead, and let his anger dissolve, feeling held and claimed in Karkat’s arms. 

There was a line in an Insane Clown Posse song Chahut played while doing inventory that came to mind, sometimes, when Karkat thought about what they did around Scrapbooks. When he considered what it meant that Gamzee’s bones were dry and buried in a murderer’s shitty coffin under cold sandy earth, way off across the country. _“Time catches all of us,”_ the song went. _“Surpassing everything.”_ The song was called “Beautiful Doom” – the song was probably right. Mostly. Sort of. About that one idea, in particular, even if Karkat couldn’t exactly wrap his brain around some of the other lyrics. (What did _“Juggalotus and you know this”_ mean?) 

Time changed and overcame everything, but sometimes people waited through it all, and sometimes people stuck around. Sometimes, even on the other side of a whole lifetime, people came home. Despite time, despite demons, despite how absolutely humiliating explaining any of this out loud had proven to be.

Who _would_ feed Jude Harley’s pigeons, when time caught up with him?

Was Lord English still wandering that country, making his deals, doing his work? And what did it mean, if he was? What could a mediocre antique store employee like Karkat Vantas ever hope to actually _do_ about something like that?

Karkat hung his jacket on the back of his chair behind the register at Scrapbooks. The world outside the shop’s windows was sunny and soft, and he was tracing the scars on the palms of his hands absently as he scanned the store. It was early, yet. Customers would come. There were some fancy new lamps in stock, and a replica pirate ship in an ancient cerulean bottle, and some tiara that was a perfect replica of one owned by the cursed heiress Trizza Tethis herself. (Unless it was the heiress’s _actual_ tiara? Nah. No fucking way.) The fake blood vials at the front desk had just been restocked, along with some gory and/or cutesy temporary tattoos Chahut had made with Amisia. They were based off Amisia’s paintings, and you know what? They still didn’t make any sense, to Karkat.

He took his seat, and… just like it always did… time moved on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we go -- ta-da!!! I hope you had fun with this. A couple things!!!
> 
> 1\. I've been wondering if "Beautiful Doom" helped inspire Lord English for a while now.  
> 2\. I will probably never be over that time in canon where Gamzee asks Dave if he should listen to Lil Cal, and Dave says yes.... BUT THEN doesn't seem to think it's pressing to tell Karkat about it, later on when he hears what happened to Gamzee??? What Gamzee's previous husband here does is very much inspired by my feelings about that. (<\-- an edit, as of 6/14/20. On a whim I was reading back through bits of canon today...... and I found out something really embarrassing about this note lol. Gamzee does, in fact, explain what Lil Cal is saying to Dave, and that he thinks it will help him rediscover the Messiahs.... and Dave DOES say yes totally go for it... but I think I misremembered an explicit question more along the lines of "what do you think?" That's my bad, and I'm sorry. I realize I've gotten this detail wrong before, now... :( If I were to rephrase this particular note, I might say I will never be over that time in canon when Dave told Gamzee to go ahead with the murders -- go ahead with listening to the puppet! -- and then didn't mention Lil Cal's influence to anybody later. This is truly something that bugs me, and a clue to what's going on with Gamzee that goes overlooked by other characters to the very best of my knowledge! But Gamzee himself was saying, "I've been listening to these whispers, and I think they could help me understand the gods!" and Dave says essentially "welp yeah that sounds right"............. ahhhh I'm so sorry. I'm talking about page 4031.)  
> Either way: this was inspired by my feelings about that.
> 
> Thank you, again!!!


End file.
